Starting a fashion blog {blogging tips part 1}

So you love fashion, clothes, accessories and you think you’ve got a good sense of style. You’ve contemplated starting a fashion blog but where to start? Fashion blogging is not as easy as it looks and regardless of some opinions out there, it requires quite a bit of your time if you want to make a success of your fashion blog.

Tequila helping me with ‘research’ for one of my blog posts 😉

Over the next couple of days I’m going to share some of my tips and thoughts on starting a fashion blog. Feel free to email me if you have any questions or if there is any particular topic you’d like me to cover. That being said, I don’t see StyleDiary as ‘the number one fashion blog in South Africa‘ and I definitely ‘don’t know it all’. The tips and thoughts shared in this series are my personal opinions that will hopefully add value for someone thinking about starting a fashion blog.

TIPS FOR STARTING A FASHION BLOG

Before we get started, write down a couple of reasons for why you want to become a fashion blogger. Do you want to show off your unique style? Do you think you’re a great bargain shopper and that others can benefit from this unique talent? Do you want to score free goodies? If the latter is your only reason, then perhaps fashion blogging is not for you. Don’t expect samples and goodies to be delivered to your door days after you start your fashion blog – it will take hard work and loads of time building relationships with brands.

So, now that you’ve decided that you indeed want to become a fashion blogger you will need to come up with a name for your blog. This is tricky and I’m going to leave that up to you – get your creative juices flowing 😉

SELECTING A BLOGGING PLATFORM

Once you have decided on a name, you’ll need to decide what blogging platform you’re going to use. I prefer WordPress, not only for my blog but also for my business website and my clients’ websites. It’s a user-friendly platform, you can install a number of plugins to customize your blog’s back-end and appearance and you can make use of free or paid-for WordPress themes to add a unique look to your blog. You can go one step further and customize a paid-for theme – for this you may need a WordPress developer’s help.

SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES

Social media will play an important role in syndicating your blog’s content. If you have existing profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other networks you’ll need to decide whether or not you’re going to use your personal profiles to promote your fashion blog – or whether you’re going to create separate profiles for your blog. I decided to create separate profiles for StyleDiary. As a business owner and lecturer I feel that fashion blogging does not always fit in with the professional (more serious) image I want to portray through my Twitter profile specifically so I created separate profiles for StyleDiary where I can talk about shopping / makeup / fashion bargains without annoying my followers that are more interested in business and marketing. It’s up to you to decide what you want to do and keep in mind that this is always something that you can change at a later stage.

That’s it for this post – in the next post of my five part fashion blogging tips series we are going to discuss how you will go about deciding what content to include on your blog. Be sure to check back tomorrow for part 2!